﻿﻿streets ﻿of rage﻿

(Circa 2001)

This game is about an ENTIRE CITY that was taken over by a “vicious crime syndicate.” That’s one effing powerful gang. The intro also explains that even the police force is under their control, except for three collegiate ex-cops who have vowed to put an end to the syndicate’s reign of terror. I’m not sure how these three expect to wipe out a whole city. I’m also not sure who they think is going to thank them when they do. “THEY ARE WILLING TO RISK ANYTHING… EVEN THEIR LIVES… ON THE… STREETS OF RAGE.” I guess whoever told the programmers to write this was doing so mid-heart attack. Anyway, our only hope is these three:

Literally, the most stereotypically diverse team the early 90s could have assembled: White Man, who video-games his way into heroism, heroic in the laziest way possible; White Lady, who dances her way into heroism, heroic in the girliest way possible; and Black Boxer, the only type of black fighter available in 80s and 90s media. Together, they plan to exterminate the entire population of a huge city, unarmed, apparently by kicking it to death, one person at a time. This task will probably take the rest of their lives, that is, either a very long time or a very short time. I'll say this: this insanity is the most plot I've ever seen in a Sega CD game (Lots of words don't equal plot, Sol-Feace.). On to level two. In this level, some vandal evidently thought he was being clever when he painted the word “Street” all over the walls of the city. I’m not sure who it was or what drove them to a life of writing random, meaningless words on a building, but I’d like to thank them for all their hard work and dedication. He must have liked this one poster, too, because there’s about five of them on every wall. It looks like a picture of a muscle man in a bikini with the name “Russel” at the bottom. Ok, screw hard work and dedication; this guy needs to be stopped, now. It’s probably the same guy that keeps hiding roast beef in telephone booths. I personally wouldn’t trust something I find in a telephone booth or a trash can to be edible but your character just eats it without question. And I really wish you could go into some of the buildings in the background. I want to know what the hell a “RACH’ SHOP BREAKFAST DINER” is and why there are so many of them on the same “Street of Rage.”

"Come eat delicious food at the RACH’ SHOP BREAKFAST DINER! Or random things you find on the ground, covered in shattered phone-booth glass. You know, whichever."

This game has some crazy bosses, too. The first boss is a pirate that throws his sword. The second is Freddy Kruger. He’s fucking difficult, too. Of course, that might just be because jump kicks don’t work on him and that’s the only move I use. The third boss is a huge guy in leather Speedos. I think he’s supposed to be the Apache Chief from the Super Friends. The fourth is a big, fat Chinese guy that breathes fire. I’m not sure how the gang boss managed to get all these guys to work for him. Either he’s the effing most brilliant man alive or he offers the best healthcare plan ever. From there the game gets less creative and has bosses like two Freddy Krugers at once. At the end of the fifth level, you have to fight two girls together. Both of them are clones of the girl on your team, only dressed in green instead of red. Also, bosses shout “SQUIRELL!” when you kill them. This game also promotes suicide. Just now, I had defeated all the enemies on the screen and no more enemies were appearing. For about five minutes, the game wouldn’t let me go anywhere. I could either do laps around the screen or practice Tai Bo. Realizing the game was screwed up, I threw my character off a cliff. Then another enemy popped out from nowhere, and the game went back to normal. So I guess the game was trying to tell me that death is the answer to my problems. But I already tried that when Sol-Feace got possessed. Nice try, Sega, but I’m not falling for that again. In order to get the “sad ending” you need to use 2 players. Since I have no friends, this quickly became a problem. Using my supreme resourcefulness combined with my advanced stupidity and bad hand-eye coordination, I came up with a solution. I used the level select to get to the last level and then controlled one character with my feet. Basically, I held down “left” and kept hitting the punch button with my toes. I do weird things when I’m alone. One time I started singing, “With a testicle here and a testicle there. Here a testicle, there a testicle, everywhere a testicle. Old McTesticle had a farm, E-I-E-I-O…” The most screwed up part of all this is the fact that the foot-controlled character didn’t lose lives any quicker than the other character and he beat up just as many bosses. Oh yeah, Good Ending=Save the City. Bad Ending=This:

GRAPHICS: 8 The graphics were pretty good, even though some of the buildings and vandalism confused me.SOUND: 9 The music was awesome! It’s the best use of Sega’s original bad sound quality since Sonic the Hedgehog.PLAY CONTROL: 8 Good moves and plenty of them. But I still had to deal with the enemies’ stay-off-screen-and-kill-me technique which they stole from Golden Axe.FUN: 8 This is the funnest Sega CD game I’ve reviewed yet. It’s almost as fun as Nintendo’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III. That game is effing awesome. COWABUNGA!!!

STREETS OF RAGE RATING: 8.5

It was a great game, even though they stole petty things like game design and certain levels from TMNTIII. On second thought, don’t listen to me, I probably just like Ninja Turtles way too much, dude.